The famous wave at Nazare, Portugal on a light day. The wave is generated from the complex motion of water travelling up a very deep underwater canyon nearly to shore where it rises and meets strong currents coming in many directions. It produces some of the biggest waves in the world. Not easy to surf.
It’s not my title. It’s the title of a book/treatise by Mark Downham, who publishes very long treatises on issues of philosophy, organization, and complexity. This one looks at hosting containers as seen against ideas embedded in Classical Chinese philosophy and it’s going to occupy a big piece of my attention over the next little while.
This has been a spring of considering some of the deeper philosophical issues that meet in the intersection of complexity, hosting, and leadership. I’ve been beavering away a digesting a number of very, very long posts principally by Downham and Snowden in order to clarify my own thinking and practice as a process host, and a teacher of participatory process. It has been a case of getting very clear about the why and where the practice of hosting and holding containers in complexity lies, what is implied by those words and concepts, and why the deep inquiry into the theory brought by these thinkers this spring helps to challenge and sharpen my practice, and help us grow as a field.
It’s not easy. The texts I’ve been reading and engaging with have my mind spinning in several ways and I have been writing bits and pieces here and there to think out loud about them. For me a big benefit of this period of reflection has been to continue to refine the material we are teaching in Complexity Inside and Out, which is a body of work that represents Caitlin’s and my developing practice on working with complexity as and where we find it in our work and lives. That work has been an extension of the work we teach in the Art of Hosting workshops we run. It goes much deeper into practices of working with complexity and introduces people to the work of Snowden, Kurtz, and Eoyang as well as our own work. It is intended to introduce practitioners to complexity tools for working with change in the contexts in which they find themselves, including how to support a personal capacity to host and lead well in complex situations. It grew out of work that we did ten years ago and more when we offered Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics with Tim Merry and Tuesday Rivera, in which each of us extended our own inquiries that started in the Art of Hosting community and took us out to other bodies of work and practice to look at change, complexity, power and personal practice.
So my restless mind and spirit of curiosity has been aroused and shaken and challenged by this rather mammoth collection of works that has appeared this spring. For background I’m going to gather the texts here.
First Downham. These are dense, unexpected texts that draw together strands from fields that are familiar to me and those that are completely outside of my experience. I told Mark he would be a great player of the Glass Bead Game:
- The Architecture of Held Space: The mountain that holds — and the host who learns to hold like one. Here Downham uses many of my writings on the Art of Hosting to discuss the idea of container, so it is getting most of my attention at the moment.
- The Geometry of the Vanishing Container: Breath and Form, Faerie and Field: Pneumatology, Gestalt, and the Liminal Topology of Emergence in the Work of Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw. which looks at issues of hosting and container work and is one of the few pieces I’ve ever read that sees Harrison Owen’s deep commitment to liturgy in its many forms and guises.
- Cynefin Dynamics and the Choreography of Organizational Change. A commentary on my favourite paper on Cynefin written by Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden in the early days
Snowden’s posts:
- Stacy Unresolved
- Leadership in the Estuary
- The whole series on estuarine thinking, beginning with part one
- Trialectics, or thinking in threes. Alos the start of a series which is inspiring me to think through some ways of talking about containers and de-binarizing some of the dualities we talk about in the art of hosting.
- Foreclosing the territory. A three part series on theories of change that is deeply important in describing the implications of anthro-complexity in change work
None of this is easy reading and these texts have been consuming my thinking over the past few months. I think they are important to my practice, and to the practice of the Art of Hosting community for these reasons, amongst others:
- They offer important claims about epistemic justice, power and subsequent practices of sense-making that help me thinking about positionally of the host, what is visible and what is invisible.
- They offer important reflections on what it means to “design” processes and what it means to host them.
- The offer oblique insights on the notion of theory and practice of working with dialogic containers, especially in complex spaces.
- They challenge the universality of methods, approaches, and tools and invite a more rigorous and context-focused consideration of what to do and how one might do it.
- They surprise me constantly and have offered illumination to some blind spots in my own understanding, generated some aha’s in my own practice, inspired some sharpness in my own thinking, and placed me in a position where I can say more clearly what it is that I do and why that matters.
- They invite us to a reflection on what has built up over time as “ways of doing things” that we take for granted, and invite us back to a renewed view of our works, its sources and the places that it might grow and evolve.
My blog is, as Mark Downham named it, is a field book of notes on practice and theory that I have assembled over the past 20 years. Taken in its totality it represents a journey of a practitioner formed in and adjacent to meaningful communities of practice, bodies of work, teachers and teachings. It is and always will be a place of half-formed thoughts and questions, offered to others as a way to connect and grow a field of practice that honours voice, agency, and community in the pursuit of a better world. It is, as Mark Woods named his blog back in the 1990s using a quote from Stendahl, “the fitful tracing of a portal.” And so I will continue musing out loud here and hope others will join the inquiry.
This inquiry is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is a theory-heavy string, and that theory is positioned in a narrow field of inquiry. It challenges and at times does not pull punches. These blog posts that Downham and Snowden have produced this spring are the deepest and most sophisticated responses to the Art of Hosting body of work I have ever seen in the 20+ plus years I have been around the community. They deserve a serious response, which I have promised to both people. This response though will come in a messy way, informed by practice, thinking, new ideas and conversation. I welcome partners in this. It’s a lot of work but I think this is a serious and important inquiry for those of us who identify, and are identified, as stewards of this work and who are willing to jump in. Just getting the questions right is going to be the first step!
Posting a link to Corina Enache’s LinkedIn post, because I don’t think she has a blog.
This one on purpose, with a hat tip to David Graeber’s work, is important. I was ruminating on this post as I walked in the Dentelles Massif yesterday in Provence.
Here is a long quote:
Purpose-driven culture, under [Graeber’s] lens, is a moral vocabulary the organisation uses to manage its people not a gift of coherence, engagement and direction. It reframes compliance as meaning and it asks you not just to do the work but to feel good about it on terms someone else defined.
The tell is what happens when you don’t feel it, when the “purpose” doesn’t land for you, when the why feels thin or disconnected from your daily reality, that becomes your problem. A coaching conversation, a culture fit question. The purpose is never interrogated but you for sure will be.
Here is the alternative: stop writing purpose statements and start asking purpose questions. What do the people doing the work think this organisation is actually for? What would they protect if they could? What makes the work feel worth doing from where they sit, not from the executive floor? You might find your purpose statement survives that conversation and you might find it needs a complete rewrite.
Purpose that is handed down is a message and purpose that is built together is a belief.
This is the best argument for taking a narrative approach to planning work. Many organizations are approaching me these days to get folks clear on purpose and it largely comes from the planning committee or the leadership and a desire for coherence or — shudder — alignment. Of course good leaders can sense a moment when a group of people feels incoherent, when they seem to be at odds with one another or somehow drifting. That’s often when consultants get called.
Enache’s antidote is probably the wisest thing that one can do to begin the process of finding purpose. Purpose hasn’t disappeared. It just shows up at different scales and in different ways. If your organization pays well to keep people around but treats them badly, expect to have a lot of employees who are there for a pay check that funds their lives rather than whatever higher or loftier goals you have.
On the other hand be wary of using purpose to coerce people into working for you and putting up with poor job conditions or underpaid labour. I see this in non-profit and other settings where an appeal to a person’s sense of duty is sometimes used as a cudgel to get them to settle for a lower standards and pay.
Mary Parker Follett famously said that “purpose is the invisible leader.” This is true. But it is true in the sense that purpose is everywhere and unless you can surface it in some way any attempt to superimpose a purpose on what’s already there will set your people at odds with one another and with the strategic decision makers. They are already being led by purpose. Do you know what it is?
Starting with a narrative capture doesn’t always give the results leaders want. One organization I worked with did this as a prequel to some focuses planning and they learned a lot of uncomfortable truths about why their staff worked the way they did and especially, why their senior staff seemed so individually focussed. It had to do with how much control the executives held. There was nothing room for anyone else to contribute and so each person just didn’t their own thing. No amount of conversation could undo the structure of the field that had been laid down for many years.
For that organization the retreat became a pro forma offsite, with the leaders unwilling to have the conversations that needed to be had. But the narrative work we did offered a repository of questions and insights that they can back to over the years and helped them let go of the control they held so tightly. It let the organization evolve through successorship phase as a few left and a few felt the shift in an invitation to step deeper into stewarding the future of the organization.
The lesson is that purpose lives in the texture of the field, not in the aspirational statements people sometimes use to structure accountabilities. Surface and explore it and it becomes possible to work with it.
Just back from teaching participatory leadership to 35 university leaders in Dallas, Texas and arrive home to find this great course outline that Cedric Jamet has put together for his university students.
This stuff is insanely useful. A set pot permanent skills that are needed for applications throughout a person’s life. ESPECIALLY in the university, where academic leaders are rarely offered any leadership training at all. Imagine now, learning how to do this in your graduate work and then putting it to use as you grow in your academic career. And imagine meeting people along the way who know what you are doing and what your are talking about because they understand the reason for leading this way and how it helps to make things better.
I was having a great conversation today catching up with colleagues from the New Jersey Education Association who have long used the principles and framework of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting for their work. One of their offerings is the NJEA Teacher-Leader Academy which is an accredited course in participatory leadership for New Jersey school teachers. It is anchored entirely in the four-fold practice.
In chatting today, I was sharing with them some of the published peer-reviewed and other research that has been done over the years on the Art of Hosting specific to or adjacent to education. I threw a bunch of links in the chat, and before I close the tabs, I thought I’d record them here for posterity.
- Practicing the Art of Hosting: Exploring what Art of Hosting and Harvesting workshop participants understand and do. A paper by Jodi Sanford, Nicholas Stuber and Kathryn Quick looking at the results of several Art of Hosting workshops done in the early 2010s at the University of Minnesota.
- Cultivating Change in the Academy: Practicing the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter within the University of Minnesota. An open source ebook on teh application of this work throughout the university.
- Learning to facilitate deliberation: practicing the art of hosting. By Kathryn Quick and Jodi Sanford and published in Critical Policy Studies in 2014. This paper talks about how deliberation practitioners learn deliberative practice through this training.
- What the f…has research got to do with the Art of Hosting. A video of Jodi discussing this research from a gathering on harvesting in 2017.
- Hosting humanizing practices in times of complexity: Lessons to be learned from Paulo Freire. This is Elizabeth Hunt’s master thesis which links the Art of Hosting to Friere’s work.
- The Art of Hosting in Education – Shifting mindsets using participatory methodologies and practices by Laura Weisel, which documents especially the role of participatory methods in educational settings
- Parent Cafes: The Gift that Keeps on Giving. A interview with Lina Cramer who spent many years using World Cafe to convene Parent Leaders within and around public school in Illinois.
I’m struck at how much of the research here focuses on methods. There isn’t A LOT on the four fold practice as a scaffolding for leadership and facilitation practice. My friends in New Jersey are underscoring the importance of that, and I hope at some point they will contribute to this body of knowledge with their own reflections on the work.
We continue to explore this world, most recently through an annual Reimagining Education offering that is called by Jennifer Williams along with me, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle. This has been a truly amazing offering the past three years and we will offer it again in 2026 in a new location in the fall.
Khelsilem reflects on his most valuable lesson from his first term of a Masters of Public Administration, and he hones in on insights from the Competing Values Framework relating to how good leadership holds tensions :
At the individual level, CVF is quietly demanding. It suggests that many leaders are not under-skilled, but over-specialized. Under pressure, they default to familiar patterns—control, inspiration, competition, or care. Leadership development, through this lens, is about expanding range: being able to support without avoiding accountability, to drive results without burning people out, to innovate without destabilizing the system.
Frameworks that help people hold tensions are useful in complexity. There are many, and here’s a collection of them from Diane Finegood who taught the Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. They can all be useful depending on context, needs, and intentions.